Welcome Digg Readers

I don’t know if any of you who found my blog from the Digg link of yesterday are sticking around to read more of my blog. I hope that some of you will find some interesting things here. While I post mostly thinking about things that are interesting and helpful to people teaching high school computer science or perhaps students in that range (plus or minus a couple of years) I am always happy to have other readers here.

For those of you regular readers who don’t follow the comments and who are wondering what I am talking about – yesterday and into today the Digg web site sent me about 46,000 hits. Over 120 people left comments as well. It made for an interesting day to day the least. That is about half the total traffic I get in an average month and 10 times as many comments as any other post I have written here. When one is expecting to see a read count number of around 400 and it is suddenly 20,000 and keeps climbing all day its something else for sure.

Some of the comments were really great and had encouraging words for a young student who is trying to do some interesting things and having what appears to be a good learning experience. Some of the comments were pretty harsh though and that is regrettable. I don’t mind to ones directed at me that much. I’ve been around enough to develop a tough skin and working at Microsoft these last few years has taught me that some people are just going to be nasty to me because of where I work. But a 12-year old doesn’t deserve that and shouldn’t have to be subjected to it. I apologize to him for exposing him to that sort of treatment.

I learned things from the positive and the negative comments though. The positive ones showed me that there are a lot of people who are willing to encourage and support students who are trying to learn on their own and who want to show people their progress. That was great. What I learned about people who abbreviate Microsoft to “M$” I’ll keep to myself though.

Well tomorrow should be completely back to normal. I think I’m going to write about some New Hampshire colleges that are doing some interesting things with Game Development as part of Computer Science or Information Science programs. I’ve visited three such schools recently and have been very impressed with what I have seen and heard. High school students who want to learn game development have a lot of options when they look for colleges these days.

It does indeed seem a bit unfortunate that some people feel inclined to place comments that are generally neither necessary nor constructive – what do they feel that they are achieving? However, the positives being, as you mentioned, I found your excellent blog and will continue reading it.